Thunderbolt Speedy Data Transfer Coming to Windows PCs in a Few Months

Thunderbolt, as most of you will be aware, is not the latest James Bond film but a super-speedy connection which was developed by Apple and Intel. It will land on Windows PCs very soon if word on the street is right.

Thunderbolt first appeared on the Apple MacBook Pro in February 2011 and then the high-bandwidth connectivity standard started to crop up on other bits of gadgety goodness such as LaCie’s Little Big Disk and then a few other non-Apple bits and pieces followed – but not that much. To be honest, support among Windows-based computers has so far been pretty much nonexistent.

This is all set to change as it sounds that a number of companies that could have products ready by Spring 2012 are Asus, Acer, Sony, and Gigabyte.

Back in September I reported that Asus and Acer were already making plans to include the Thunderbolt I/O standard and that Sony thought about it and then went their own propriety route (as usual) for their Vaio Z ultraportable – it sounds like Sony may be joining the gang soon though.

Intel has reportedly informed its partners that it will “fully release” Thunderbolt in April 2012 and even though Intel is not willing to officially comment their spokesman, Dave Salvatore, did kinda agree to the mentioned timeframe: “Our guidance remains that we expect to see Windows-based systems with Thunderbolt in the first half of 2012,”

Apparently Gigabyte Technology should have Thunderbolt-equipped motherboards available around the same time and Sony is expected to change its current modified USB 3.0 port which uses the Thunderbolt controllers to the standard Thunderbolt port.

Thunderbolt first appeared as Light Peak back in 2009 and now replaces Apple’s Display Port on their new machines. It was measured to be 20 times faster than the theoretical limit of USB 2.0, 12 times faster than FireWire 800, and twice as fast as USB 3.0. According to Intel that 10Gbps isn’t just a theoretical peak speed, but is truey usable bandwidth.

This means that two devices pushing data at the maximum rate could back up a full Blu-ray movie in 30 seconds, or sync 64GB of music to a portable device in about a minute.

Do you fancy having that on your PC? Can I get a “Hell Yeah!”? 🙂